One feature
that helped differentiate Google+ from Facebook is Circles, the function that
lets users assign friends, family, colleagues and others to different groups.
Facebook,
which has long had Friend Lists and last fall launched its Groups feature to
assign users to groups, launched more granular sharing tools to target specific
groups of people with which to share information.

"Want to
see posts from your closest friends? Or perhaps you'd like to share a personal
story with your family-without also telling all your co-workers. With improved
Friend Lists, you can easily see updates from and share with different lists of
friends," explained Facebook product manager Blake Ross,
who created the Mozilla Firefox browser.

One of the
pains involved with lists is, well, creating them and keeping them up-to-date.
Ross and his team created "Smart lists," which create themselves and
stay up-to-date based on profile information a user's friends have in common.
Facebook's Smart
Lists include work, school, family and city. Friends who attended the same
college or work for the same company would instantly appear on a smart list,
which will have its own News Feed of photos, status updates and other posts
from the people on the list. Users may also manually add or subtract names from
their smart lists.
Also new to
Friend Lists are close friends and acquaintances lists, which will show status
updates and pictures from best friends in one place. Users must manually
populate these lists, similar to the way they add or subtract contacts to
Circles on Google+.
To facilitate
sharing among users on lists, Ross made it clear that people on lists will be
able to see each other's names. "For example, if I see that a post is
shared with my five closest friends, I am much more likely to comment freely on
it than I would be if I didn't know who else could see the post," Ross
said.
No doubt,
users will try to push for some privacy measure concerning this feature.
Facebook has
also improved its friend suggestions feature, which would help users who may
have inadvertently left some friends off their lists. Moreover, when a user
adds someone as a friend or confirms a friendship request, the user will be
able to add the friend to any of their existing lists.
Sometimes
users don't want to share information with others, even if they want to be
friends with them, on Facebook. The social network is offering a Restricted
list. Users on this list will only see another users' public posts. This is
particularly helpful for users who are friends with their boss or other
superiors and colleagues on Facebook.
Facebook may
or may not have been prompted by the Google+ Circles construct to improve its
Friend Lists. Google+ has an acquaintance Circle, though "close friends"
is a new category.
Moreover,
Google+ doesn't have automatic listing functionality-yet. While some will claim
Facebook is copying Google+ functionality, it's quite likely Google+ will add
its own form of smart lists to make friending and sharing information easier.
With Facebook
having 750 million users worldwide, compared with 30 million or so Google+
users, it's much more important for Google to keep pace with Facebook than vice
versa.